CLEO was a general purpose particle detector at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), and the name of the collaboration of physicists who operated the detector. The name CLEO is not an acronym; it is short for Cleopatra and was chosen to go with CESR (pronounced Caesar). CESR was a particle accelerator designed to collide electrons and positrons at a center-of-mass energy of approximately 10 GeV. The energy of the accelerator was chosen before the first three bottom quark Upsilon resonances were discovered between 9.4 GeV and 10.4 GeV in 1977. The fourth Υ resonance, the Υ(4S), was slightly above the threshold for, and therefore ideal for the study of, B meson production.
CLEO was a hermetic detector that in all of its versions consisted of a tracking system inside a solenoid magnet, a calorimeter, particle identification systems, and a muon detector. The detector underwent five major upgrades over the course of its thirty-year lifetime, both to upgrade the capabilities of the detector and to optimize it for the study of B mesons. The CLEO I detector began collecting data in October 1979, and CLEO-c finished collecting data on March 3, 2008.
CLEO initially measured the properties of the Υ(1–3S) resonances below the threshold for producing B mesons. Increasing amounts of accelerator time were spent at the Υ(4S) as the collaboration became more interested in the study of B mesons. Once the CUSB experiment was discontinued in the late 1980s, CLEO then spent most of its time at the Υ(4S) and measured many important properties of the B mesons. While CLEO was studying the B mesons, it was also able to measure the properties of D mesons and tau leptons, and discover many new charm hadrons. When the BaBar and Belle B factories began to collect large amounts of data in the early 2000s, CLEO was no longer able to make competitive measurements of B mesons. CLEO revisited the Υ(1-3S) resonances, then underwent its last upgrade to CLEO-c. CESR ran at lower energies and CLEO measured many properties of the ψ resonances and D mesons. CLEO was the longest running experiment in the history of particle physics.
History
Proposal and construction
Cornell University had built a series of synchrotrons since the 1940s. The 10 GeV synchrotron in operation during the 1970s had conducted a number of experiments, but it ran at much lower energy than the 20 GeV linear accelerator at SLAC. As late as October 1974, Cornell planned to upgrade the synchrotron to reach energies of 25 GeV and build a new synchrotron to reach 40 GeV. After the discovery of the J/Ψ in November 1974 demonstrated that interesting physics could be done with an electron-positron collider, Cornell submitted a proposal in 1975 for an electron-positron collider operating up to center-of-mass energies of 16 GeV using the existing synchrotron tunnel. An accelerator at 16 GeV would explore the energy region between that of the SPEAR accelerator and the PEP and PETRA accelerators. CESR and CLEO were approved in 1977 and mostly finished by 1979. CLEO was built in the large experimental hall at the south end of CESR; a smaller detector named CUSB (for Columbia University-Stony Brook) was built at the north interaction region. Between the proposal for and construction of CESR and CLEO, Fermilab discovered the Υ resonances and suggested that as many as three states existed. The Υ(1S) and Υ(2S) were confirmed at the DORIS accelerator. The first order of business once CESR was running was to find the Υs. CLEO and CUSB found the Υ(1S) shortly after beginning to collect data, and used the mass difference from DORIS to quickly find the Υ(2S). CESR's higher beam energies allowed CLEO and CUSB to find the more massive Υ(3S) and discover the Υ(4S). Furthermore, the presence of an excess of electrons and muons at the Υ(4S) indicated that it decayed to B mesons. CLEO proceeded to publish over sixty papers using the original CLEO I configuration of the detector.
CLEO had competition in the measurement of B mesons, particularly from the ARGUS collaboration. The CLEO collaboration was worried that the ARGUS detector at DESY would be better than CLEO, therefore it began to plan for an upgrade. The improved detector would use a new drift chamber for tracking and dE/dx measurements, a cesium iodide calorimeter inside a new solenoid magnet, time of flight counters, and new muon detectors. The new drift chamber (DR2) had the same outer radius as the original drift chamber to allow it to be installed before the other components were ready.